Efficacy of Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Reduction of Negative Emotions in Obese Women

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) was originally developed to treat individuals with pervasive emotion dysregulation. Then it developed its approach in other disorders such as obesity. This research aims to found out the efficacy of DBT in the reduction of negative emotions (anxiety, depression, and anger) with weight loss in obese women with different reasons for obesity. The population of this quasi-experimental study consisted of 56 obese women with a body mass index more than 29.9 kg/m2. Descriptive statistics were computed for demographic information and self-report questionnaire. Anger, Anxiety and,, Depression are three subscales of feelings that were tested by the 25 items of Emotional Eating Scale that was developed by Arnow, Kenardy and Agras in 1994. The results demonstrated that negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and depression, significantly (ρ-value<0.001) decrease in obese women by weight loss during the time. Mixed-effect modeling ANOVA repeated measurements were performed to study changes in variables over time. The results of the present study show that DBT-skills can be effective in decreasing emotion dysregulations and Body Mass Index (BMI).